Triple Diminished Ideas

Here are some ideas based on my very imperfect understanding of Yusef Lateef's "triple diminished" approach to 12-tone improvisation. I'm not sure how he improvised with it in real time (though it seems from what I've read that he did) but the results certainly sound interesting and usable.

The first page is what I take to be triple diminished lines. Three diminished seventh chords seperated by half steps form a disjoint cover of the chromatic scale; you arrange them in a sequence then play a line that chooses one note from each chord in turn without repeatition, forming a 12-tone row.

My triple diminished pattern has 12 tones with no two adjacent notes from the same diminished seventh chord. For example, in order for a triple diminished pattern to have 12 notes in groups of three, the first three notes are C, D and C sharp. The next group would start a minor third above the C. So you'd play E flat, F and E. The next group would start on F sharp and move to G sharp and G. The last three would be A, B and B flat. That's just one triple diminished pattern. Clearly, I have to do a lot of thinking when I’m playing, but it’s second nature to me now.

Below are some simple examples I cooked up, on various equal divisions of the octave -- three diminished sevenths, four augmented triads and two whole-tone scales. There are a lot more possibilities, and of course one can do the same thing with other structures subdividing multiple octaves equally, à la Slonimsky, or one can use disjoint covers that don't happen to be symmetrical.

I'm not sure whether I can use these ideas as is, or how well they represent what Lateef meant by the term "triple diminished", but they're certainly interesting. I'd welcome any mroe info from someone who knew or studied with Lateef, or who knows where he may have written about this approach in more detail.